A remote attacker could entice a user to connect to a malicious IRC server, resulting in the remote execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. A local attacker could perform symlink attacks to overwrite arbitrary files on the local machine.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

Since BitchX is no longer maintained, we recommend that users unmerge the vulnerable package and switch to another IRC client: